Gabrielle's Tax Returns
by Phineas Redux
Summary: Gabrielle finds herself the centre of attention of the Athenian Tax Office and, as an Amazon Queen, she isn't happy.


' **Gabrielle's Tax Returns** '

By

Phineas Redux

—O—

 **Description:—** Gabrielle finds herself the centre of attention of the Athenian Tax Office and, as an Amazon Queen, she isn't happy.

 **Disclaimer:—** MCA/Universal/RenPics, or somebody, own all copyrights to everything related to ' _Xena: Warrior Princess_ ' and I have no rights to them, dam' it.

—O—

The Inn sat on one of those tight bendy rather dusty back-streets off the Pan-Athenaic Way; one of hundreds of meandering secondary streets and lanes, of which the main area of the city was made up. For, although the Acropolis was justly famed throughout the known world, Athens' city planning was, by contrast, the laughing-stock of all civilised nations; including, scathingly, Scythia.

Anyway, that's as may be; what gains our attention this bright sunny morning are the two women sitting unhappily at a table in the main saloon of the Inn; it being as yet too early for a really determined assemblage of drinkers to show up. The tall dark handsome one was idly testing how far back she could lean in her chair without it falling over and depositing her strongly-muscled frame on the sawdust-covered floor; while her smaller, more petite, gentler, you'd think, blonde and gorgeous companion slouched unbecomingly with her forearms as well as elbows on the table—Callenius, that master of etiquette, would have something to say about that if he had been there to notice, but he wasn't, happily for him.

"Dam' ingrates."

"Was'sat, lover?"

"I said everyone o'those fools on the Hill have always foreborn t'ascertain whether their parents, an' most o'their other ancestors, were ever legally married or not; an' I know the answer." The white-haired Queen, usually so relaxed and easy-going, was showing her dark side—well, pale-grey, at least. "They've had the gall t'pin me t'the wall for tax evasion, or so they say, in this dam' scroll."

"The Senate House ain't on the Hill, as y'd like t'think, dear." Xena was always one for precision of thought—Facts, she often opined, were what mattered; having once read inadvertently—thinking it a treatise on the right way of disciplining a hoplite regiment—one of Aristotle's books on the matter; scientific regulation, that is, not hoplites. "It's, _er_ , its,—well, it's somewhere off in the City itself; Piraeus way, I think."

"What's that absolutely useless piece of information got t'do with anythin', lady?"

" _Oh_ , just sayin', is all." The warrior woman sat up carefully, having dark suspicions of the off-front leg of her chair. "So, tax? Why?"

"Wha'd'ya mean—Tax?—Why?" Gabrielle raised her head, shook her blonde locks aside to give her a clear view of her adversary, and aimed a glowering frown at the black-haired woman—which, of course, failed in its purpose completely, Xena well-knowing by now how to handle an irate Queenly member of the Amazon tribe. "They've sent me this scroll, by fast courier, would you believe; askin' me t'pay three hundred drachmas, or get thrown in the local jail pronto, without trial, and mercilessly, come t'that. A month t'cough up, and kindly don't leave the city-state of Athens without first alerting the Tax Office goons. Bloody idiots, don't they realise I'm an Amazon?"

Having just finished a hearty morning meal a little over quarter of a clepsydra ago, and now enjoying the benefits of quiet digestion, Xena settled herself on her chair, regarding her partner with concern in her deep blue eyes. Time to bring all the life-long expertise, and accumulated knowledge, of her adventurous life to bear on the matter in hand.

"Sure they addressed it t'the right respondent?"

"What? Res—? What?"

"Did they mean someone else, dearie. Have they sent their bloody summons t'the wrong person? Do wake up?"

"I'm alert, lady, I'm alert."

Gabrielle showed her pearly whites, snarling coldly at a fly which presently had the temerity to land by her left elbow—having designs on a piece of bread the Amazon had abandoned shortly before. Looking up at the source of the sudden coldness surrounding it the fly took an objective view of the matter, and its safety, and opening its wings flew off again in high dudgeon—Amazons!

"Three hundred silver drachmas, the Tax fools say." The blonde Amazon continued relentlessly. "An', seemingly, maybe a couple o'hundred more once they've finally totted up their other papyri an' scrolls. _Ha_ , that'll be the day, sister."

"Where're ya gon'na get five hundred o'the silver darlin's from, lady?" Xena creased an only partially interested brow. "An' don't look at me like that. I got about six hemitartemorions t'my name, an' that's it, babe."

"Lady, if I wanted a loan you'd be the last person I'd touch for it." Gabrielle's cold tone said all that need be said about the state of her partner's finances. "Nah, I think, on the other hand, it's time t'skip out for pastures new. Don't you feel the wide open plains calling you, Xena?"

"No, I don't." The lady in question eased herself into a slightly more comfortable position on her chair. "We only just found this Inn two days ago, an' I like the cut of it's prow so we're stayin' the full seven days. O'course, you can skip out by yourself anytime; I ain't stoppin' ya. Just don't think I'm gon'na include myself in your outlaw status."

"Outlaw? Outlaw?" The blonde Queen sat up straight, incensed beyond belief. "I ain't a dam' outlaw. Those morons at the Tax Office've just added up their figures wrong, that's all. _Hmm_ , it's still early,—"

The Warrior Princess could see what was in the wind as clearly as if it had been painted in lights on the far wall, and she didn't like what she found there.

" _Oh Gods_ , you're not—"

"—goin' t'beard the ar-h-'s in their clammy den? Dam' right I am." Gabrielle stood up with a determined frown, shook her bare shoulders becomingly, and bent swiftly to test the tightness of one of the boot-cords holding her sai in place. When she rose once more to face her lover a steely light radiated from her emerald eyes. "Come on. By the way, which way's the dam' Tax Office?"

" _Oh Gods._ "

—O—

The Tax Office was monumental, having once belonged to a Senator—before the Athenian Council found out he had only a fractional interest in paying his own taxes; a very small fraction. Retribution had been swift and all-encompassing.

In the wide light hall a small table stood in the middle of the mosaic floor, guarding the wide staircase leading to distant regions on the floor above. This instrument of the Tax Office being guarded itself by a seated, but heavily-built, official with a glowering frown that looked life-long.

"Wa'd'yer wan'?"

Having just promised her lover, outside in the street, she wouldn't lose her temper too quickly, Gabrielle let this scornful question go, but it cost her dearly.

"I got this dam' scroll from you apes this mornin'." Nothing loth the petite blonde Amazon strode in where Ares himself might have hesitated just a trifle. "Say's I'm in hock to you fools for three hundred drachma. Where's the idiot responsible? I want words with him."

"Got an appointment?"

"Nah."

"Then yer can't get in. Shove orf."

There now followed a short pause, while Gabrielle battled her inner demons. To Xena, standing by her side, it looked as if the demons were winning; so, quietly, she prepared for whatever might follow.

The Amazon rose to her full height, which was an impressive sight when she was angry. Then, casually, she unostentatiously glanced round to left and right, taking in the full sweep of the at present empty marbled hall. After which she returned a now fiery gaze of greenly-glowing embers to the subject of her growing fury. She took a step forward and gently leaned her arms on the front edge of the table, bringing her head and face within a hand's-breadth of the seated man.

"Look around, buster." Gabrielle's tone was cold; Xena herself imagining she actually saw icicles forming on the far corners of the dark wooden desk. "This place's empty, apart from yourself an' my friend and I. I'm an Amazon; I kill Romans; I kill Scythians; I kill thieves an' warlords an' deadbeats of all types an' styles. At the moment I find myself disliking you the more I hear you speak. Because why? Because you ain't tellin' me what I wan'na hear. D'you wan'na know what I wan'na hear from you, sunshine?"

By this time the cicerone of the establishment had realised this was not one of his white pebble days; more like a black boulder day. Glancing uneasily from his angry interlocutor to Xena and back, he swiftly concluded the only safe course was ignominious retreat, welching on anyone likely to save his carcass the while.

"Tax Inspector, Citizens, Personal Taxes—first floor, left corridor, second door on the left, don't knock."

"Thanks." Gabrielle bared her teeth in something far from being a smile. "Don't even think about calling for reinforcements; I'll have t'be coming back this way, y'see. Come on, lady; follow me."

—O—

The single door was a foot or two taller than Xena, made of dark hardwood, and sported a round metal hand-grip on the right side. Gabrielle stepped back, lithely raised her foot and kicked it open with supreme sang-froid, as the Gauls say. It banged against the inner wall, and stayed open giving a glimpse into the room beyond.

Another wide sweep of this time a merely parqueted floor; another heavy desk; a few cupboards and wooden scroll-containers along the left wall; a tall window on the right; behind the desk, piled high with partially unrolled scrolls, an astonished middle-aged grey-haired but slightly balding myrmidon of the Athenian State.

"You the Tax Inspector?"

"— _er_ , yes."

"I'm Gabrielle of Potidaea, the Amazon Queen."

" _Oo-er._ "

"I got a scroll from you bums this mornin'." Gabrielle's tone was quiet, but filled with venom as she walked across to stand in front of the bemused clerk. "Just as I was polishing off my morning rabbit stew; fairly took my appetite away; your blackmailing scroll, not the stew. Well?"

"— _ah_ , what can I do for you, madam?" The Inspector bravely tried to re-connect with his own composure, but found it impossible; sweat breaking out on his brow.

"What I want you to do is say it's not so, dear." When really riled Gabrielle always fell back on sarcasm of the most extreme crudity, such appealing to her sense of the rightness of things. "You don't actually want t'mulct me of three hundred drachmas, never mind five hundred, do you now? I mean, where's the sense in that; seein' as I don't owe the Athenian state as much as a bent hemitartemorion."

The Inspector opened and shut his mouth silently a few times, always a good way of gaining time to think; if, indeed, your mind wasn't frozen in fear—his, he found, was.

"— _ah, ah,_ " Manfully, the Inspector brought his shattered intellect to bear on the problem; one of his imminent survival in one piece, he thought, rather than any question of the taxes. "May I see, _er_ , the scroll?"

With silent menace Gabrielle leaned further over the desk and handed the guilty object to the now quivering man. The Inspector, once he managed to focus, scrutinised the parchment, unrolling it silently as he progressed through the scribe's writing filling it from border to border with legal inanities. Then he looked up, bravely, at his less than calm visitor.

"It would seem this is, _ah_ , in order—"

"No it ain't, babe, not by a Roman ballista's range, it ain't."

The mighty Queen had endured enough, far more than usual in fact; she having, she rather thought to herself, created a new record for the length of her patience this morning—but now all constraints were off, and the demon was freed.

"One, I ain't an Athenian citizen—I'm from Potidaea, in Chalcidice. Two, I _am_ an Amazon Queen. Want me to prove it?" With this she swiftly bent and, rising again, gently twirled a lethal-looking long-bladed sai in her left hand. "Third, my friend and I have done the bloody Athenian State enough good turns in our time t'launch a thousand triremes—so the dam' State should, an' does to our known comfort, refrain from taxing us at all. You should have the relevant scrolls in your records; an' if not I'll happily get the Senate to send you copies—along with the order clapping you in a dirty stone-walled cell for the next twenty years. Shall I?"

Faced with what amounted to a legal Scythian stand-off, the Inspector gazed mournfully from the scroll to his visitors and back. The scroll told him nothing; his visitors told him of likely physical Nemesis in the near future; and the threat of the Senate sounded frighteningly in his ears. And, anyway, the Inspector just the day before having himself gone over the known scrolls dealing with Gabrielle's affairs; and making the now clearly unsound decision to bluff her, Chalcidice citizen or not, for non-existent taxes, he realised all too late he had only himself to blame for the present debacle; as those dam' Gauls say, they seemingly having a phrase for every instance. What to do; what to do.

"— _er_ , by mere chance I find I have your scroll-records to hand, here on my desk.—"

"Oh yeah?"

"—and they, yes, they seem on further scrutiny, to uphold your statement. Who would have known?"

"Me, buster, me."

"—so, _er_ , all things taken under consideration, I think it quite appropriate to, _um_ , rescind this obviously mistaken and misplaced scroll, and clear your record of all, _ah_ , inappropriate comments and allusions. There, I've scratched out the summons and request for taxes—"

"All taxes, sunshine, from now till Armageddon."

"— _er_ , let me see, yes, that will do the trick, I believe." The Inspector scraped away industriously for a few moments, then dropped his quill and offered the re-written scroll to his still infuriated customer. "Is this to your, _er_ , satisfaction?"

The at-present nearly unhinged Amazon grabbed the scroll impolitely, tearing its bottom corner in her haste to see what the idiot Inspector had written. She brought it close to her face to read, slowly, over the entire text—Xena meanwhile standing beside her, ready in an instant to stop the fiery blonde from actually leaping the desk and carrying out summary justice on the subject of her scorn. Finally Gabrielle cast the offending document down on the cluttered desk and eyed the source of her discontent unlovingly.

"Yeah, suppose it'll do." She stepped back a pace or two, but turned again, thinking just then of a good riposte— _Gods_ , those Gauls had it all at their finger-tips. "One thing—I want a personal copy, in triplicate; I want another triplicate copy sent to the Senate today; I want all references to payin' taxes, either by me or my well-built strikingly athletic and remorseless black-haired friend here, expunged completely, never to have their heads rise to the surface ever again; and finally, I know where you live, understand?"

"— _er, er, er,_ "

"Fine, good-day to you; hope I never see you again. Come on, lady, let's scrape the filth an' dust of this den of iniquity from our boots. Which way's that stair-case, again? This way? Left? Right? What? Well, you came along with me, woman. Right? OK, let's go, then."

—O—

Back at the Inn Gabrielle and Xena once more sat at their table, now counting the extent of their current wealth; at the warrior Princess's insistence.

"Quite a fair sum, after all,—I'm surprised." Gabrielle raked the assortment of coins lovingly together in a small pile. "And this little beauty here's a hemitartemorion."

"I know what the dam' it is, Gabs." Xena sneered. "It's a worthless coin nobody in their right minds ever uses these days. What in Hades are ya doin', with a handful of 'em?"

"Six, darling." The blonde accountant was unimpressed. "And might I say that sixteen of these beauties make an obol?"

" _Whoop-de-whoo._ "

"An' six obols make a drachma." Gabrielle continued relentlessly along the road of financial economics. "An' when you start raking in the drachmas; well, you're made, madam. Eventually, rich as Croesus."

"Gabrielle, I love your imagination." Xena took a glance around the empty Inn saloon, then leaned over to plant a warm kiss on her lover's cheek. "An' all the rest of you, too, of course."

The blonde subject of these all-embracing delights smirked widely, as of the manner born, and glanced up at her companion with an inquiring green eye.

"Is that by way of being in any way a suggestion of things t'come, darling?"

"Might be."

" _Oh_ , so, what?" Gabrielle giggled lightly as they stood up, coins safely stowed in her satchel, making their way to the rickety stair leading to the private rooms above. "Do I have t'ask what your intentions are, lady? Me being an innocent gal from the country, an' all?"

The tall Princess put her arm over Gabrielle's shoulder as they crossed the room; the two women close together.

" _Oh_ , y'know perfectly well what my intentions are, ducky." Xena laughed, from deep in her throat. "Hope they're echoed in yours, dear?"

"Y'know, I'm certain they are, darling, I'm certain they are." Gabrielle giggled again, as they negotiated the stairs. "I'm takin' the right-side, o'course."

" _Oh_ , come on." Xena's tone was beseeching. "You know I like to be on the window side."

"Not tonight, dear, not tonight." Gabrielle cast an eye over her shoulder at the Princess, one step below. "I've been reading old Indian scrolls, y'know. There are some— _er_ , positions an', _er_ , activities, I think you've never tried before, darling."

"Sure, lover?"

"Well, wait an' see." Gabrielle sniggered as they entered their room, Xena snapping the lock shut behind them. "First of all y'do this, see?—"

" _Cripes._ "

"Then y'—"

" _Ahh._ "

"What'd I tell you, gorgeous." Gabrielle, already unclothed, was in full control of the situation. "Now, what you do is—"

" _Arrh._ "

"Knew you'd like it, lover."

 **The End.**

—O—


End file.
